Gonna start reviewing some of the more unjustly obscure books I love.

This is the extreme of metafiction, modernism, postmodernism, experimentation.

Forget Pynchon and Calvino and Beckett and Joyce and Stein And Woolf and DFW and Fritz and Cervantes and Burroughs and ...

Or, more correctly, amalgamate them. Take the self-reflexivity of Calvino's notte d'inverno and the drunken stumbling of Ulysses and the iterative lists of Beckett's Watt and the piercing foresight of Cervantes and the impenatrability of Stein's poems and the typographic experimentation of Fritz's Die Festung and the ...

Actually, why spoil it? If that wom't convince you, listing more authors won't either.

Here's a sample:

Each word on the page seemed ossified. The word face was a stone. The word guess was a flint. The words a, the, in, by, up, it, were pebbles. The word laughter was marble. Run was cartilage. Shelf was bone. Talk was an oak board. See was made of quartz. The word refrigerator was enameled. The word attention was concrete. The word iron was iron. The word help was wrought-iron. The word old was crag. The word touch was brick. The word read was mica and I was granite.

That excerpt makes no sense except in reference to itself. In reference to itself, it's perfect.

I will admit it gets ridiculous in how extreme it is. A love it or hate it book, I enjoy opening to random selections, reading a page, and considering the brilliance of every line.

It's included in her collection The Saddest Thing I Have to Use is Words: A Madeline Gins Reader -- or you can fork over 300 USD for the original (no idea if it's available online).